


Blue Summer Sky

by wildcanary



Category: Queer as Folk (US)
Genre: Childhood Memories, Cities, Divergent Timelines, Dreams, Fever Dreams, Flashbacks, M/M, New York, POV Brian Kinney (Queer as Folk), Pittsburgh, Reality Bending, Rivers, Season/Series 01, Sort Of, Time Shenanigans, Time Skips, Timeline What Timeline, Urban Fantasy, Visions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-11
Updated: 2019-07-11
Packaged: 2020-05-14 00:29:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19262284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wildcanary/pseuds/wildcanary
Summary: In which Brian is the genius of Pittsburgh, and Justin is a ghost (sort of).





	Blue Summer Sky

_You can be anything in Pittsburgh, a stripper, a writer, a student, a bartender, or something else, or everything else, all of it at once, and no one cares, or if they care, they mean it, it's love. --Dave Newman_

 

Fuck, Brian says, fucking--

 

hell. _Oh, god._

 

This is the way the city speaks to him sometimes, in a curt wind off the rivers and particulates and glitter, in _heights_  and _points_  and waves of lust and pity and full-blown grass-eyed monstrosity: you are  _mine_ , and you will never _,ever_ leave me. His back's to the brick and he bucks and comes with such ferocity that he doesn't remember that his hands aren't in anyone's hair at all. 

 

*****

They move through the city like gods, like monsters, like ghosts. Shucked skins and bled lips: all the boys on the avenue.

Fuck me, Justin says, and he's so, so--like he could suck souls right out through dicks, which is how Brian'll go if he ever does. (Pitts won't let him. Holds his damn hand, sometimes, carries him home when he's too high or sick or drunk or stupid to get there himself).

Truth is, nothing can get between him and the city that l*ves him.

Except: a spirit with substance, such as he is. This kid.

Smoke, shotgunned between.

*****

I can see the future, Brian says, elbows on the table and shades still slapped over last night's sins.

Oh for fuck's sake, Deb says. She slipped some fat into this sandwich because (he knows, he knows) his cheekbones are Allegheny quartzites and the wind off the water cuts them harder still, in the cold. 

How much dick would a woodchuck chuck, Emmett is singsonging, who the fuck knows why. 

If a woodchuck could chuck dick, Ted says, and they guffaw, who the fuck knows why.

Punxsutawney on TV, maybe, checking out his fat shadow; six more winter weeks, though it's too early for that.

He thinks of a time when he and Mikey were kids and there he was, the soothsayer of Gobbler's Knob (!) on Channel 2, telling them they'd have more snow, more snow days, more afternoons to fall down in the sooty slush of Morningside and make gay angels; and then he knew: they'd never leave this place.

*****

He can try. 

Justin fucks him and follows him,  _heels_ ; a haunting.

He tries--to give his ghost over to Liberty, in a ritual known only to them: _Ta_ _ke this one instead, a sacrifice, innocent if not quite virginal anymore, this boy; take him and keep him here, keep him safe while you're at it._

But it doesn't work like that, does it.

These are the only transactions he can't parse, can't fight or fuck or figure his way through.

And the kid doesn't know what he's really up against.

*****

On a Wednesday in December he comes home sick from bullshit (a public transit campaign, city-approved) and falls over before he can pull his tie loose, silks humped and pooled, riverine, around his ankles and knees.

He dreams, of course he does, feverish and fucked-out, with druggy dissolves and flights over the lit bridges and in through his own windows again. Justin is there, laid out on his bed statue-still and sleeping, or worse--beautiful in a way he's never before thought of. 

Dream-Justin's hair is longer and there's a strip of a scar, just there in the wheatfield his hair makes. The weather has grown warm. There are blue skies and boys and birds and boats and leaves in the parks and all the sappy shit he should never think about lest the city smack him sober, then shower pollen down on his windshield and the shoulders of his suits and make him breathe to drunkenness again until he passes out, falls down, never to come up from _fairyland_ again.

He wakes to predawn and lights up, lets the smoke carry him awake.

*****

_Terrible things_ , the city whispers, when he goes out to work again,

_are going to happen._

Shut the fuck up, he says aloud, good-natured. He feels better, having shucked the dreams with his blackest brew, ready to go forth and come home kissed and fucked and worshipped, garlanded with the balls of his enemies. Another day.

 

At breakfast Mikey gives him a sour look. Emmett brushes something off his coat. He won't meet Justin's eyes, won't let him catch a glimpse, acid trace, of the night before. It's almost the kid's birthday. And then, the seasons ticking away, it'll be his own, and his again.

Justin, coffee breath, asking him if he wants--

he always _wants._

But later he's riding the sweet wave of the E train, the floor of Babylon blue as the eyes of a boy from Philly (his weakness, tall-dark-handsome like himself) who will, in the end, cede, kneel and roll over and play dead until the city raises the sun soft on his shamewalk home.

*****

It's true: 

The real Justin is, must be, just a brat from the 'burbs, whose never known what it's like to--

_lack._

This boy is an apparition, a sending.

When they met, he was hallucinating. That's how he explains it, haloes and all. 

(Real-enough, Justin's underwear, and his baggage, and his fucking father's footprints where they don't belong.)

He sure can put it away, for an apparition, Emmett says.

I didn't mean literally, Brian says, irritably.

Can you _literally_   be a ghost? says Ted. 

Says the man who _literally_   couldn't be any whiter, Brian says. He'd lay on the wit like mayo, but the thing is--

it's the first time the universe has ever given up something so unutterable. 

Except for his kid, of course; except for Gus.

*****

At Woody's, after work, he meets Marilyn, queen and barfly and clairvoyant, not for the first time, and buys her a beer.

Why are you here, she says, as if I don't know.

Why me, he says, then hates himself in his IPA.

Really, honey, Marilyn says, that's not a thing you say, but if you want to know why--

I'm queer, I don't give a fuck, he says, what does this place want with--

You've got an eye for architecture, Marilyn says, winks, look--you know this city ain't all Scots and Carnegie anymore. It's not your daddy's Pittsburgh. One day there'll be a hot young mayor who doesn't even think of this as a steel town, and Liberty Avenue won't be a second Sodom, and the gay history of the Hill'll be an art exhibit, and--

He watches her take a sip, push her bracelets up her arms and her deck to the side. 

And, she says, you scamps won't all be such narcissists and misogynists, or so definite about all your pronouns. And you'll be able to marry whomever you--

I know I didn't come here for a history lesson--or a lecture, Brian says. Now he's pissed. Now he needs a shot.

Marilyn calls for one and sets it in front of him with a delicate tap.

You, she says, are the most _taken_ man in all of the Pitts.

He bangs the shot and gives her the brows:

Not the other way around? 

Not really, she says, you think you can see the future, but you're not clairvoyant; you're just versatile.

To his surprise, he bursts out laughing.

Marilyn puts a hand on his arm, heavy through the leather:

You go right out there and queer it up, honey, but--

one way or another you're going to end up exactly where you belong. 

*****

Where he ends up is the ER, eyeful of blood and still with the shock of it (later, even more, that Justin's _dad_ , all Tuck-school jowl and sadsack no-homo, could have balls big enough for a hit-and-run, and a sucker punch besides).

One of the nurses is hot, coming in and out of focus as he butterflies a gash, talking softly (not from here, not from the Pitts) about concussion protocols and an exhibit at the Frick.

It's because I wouldn't fuck him, Brian says, and the nurse raises a brow, would maybe hand over his digits if not for that  _rod_  of Asclepius around his neck.

It's  _because_ , Brian goes on, and then can't think what he was going to say, but later, at home, wanders free through the headachy wreckage: Jeep jangling, city dangling the traffic lights, keeping him safe from worse, maybe, but why not months ago, why not on a school night, why not when he first spotted a spirit other than its own; why.

He swallows water, looks at himself in the mirror, lies down with his phone, dreams awake.

(Justin draws portraits, mostly, but once Brian found a cityscape, charcoal with hits of cyan, the frown-arcs of Pitt and Duquesne, water and sky like found family, most of all himself.) 

*****

Justin says _why_   the way other people say _the_.

_Insatiable._

_Incorrigible._

_Invincible._

_Invisible._

They're looking at each other in the mirror and there's only one reflection, seems like. 

_One day_ , it says, _I'm going to tell you that you never should have let me go._

Justin draws letters when the glass fogs, writes their names and laughs and drops his towel on the floor.

The steam from the shower consumes them, then, makes ghosts of them both.

*****

Terrible things happen:

(He falls in love.)

His father is dead. His sister is a bitch. His mother is a bitch. He and Mikey break up and make up and and break up and make out. Get drunk. Go on the road. 

New York is a dream. Justin is sketching in Central Park, banging every boy in Chelsea, painting nudes that aren't him while Manhattan steams, gargantuan, like it could swallow Pittsburgh whole and go on, nonchalant, sweating and sexing and keeping its counsel.

Mikey has never been anywhere and it makes him shy, makes him dodge lovers like he's too provincial. He's _kept_   too but not in the way Brian is, his secret shame, where-- _you can do anything,_ Mikey says, and he doesn't know, and never will, how Brian catches an eyeful of Big Apple, the Flatiron slicing its wedge in the blue--and knows, he knows, who this city really wants.

It isn't him. 

*****

He works harder, works longer, looks at bricks and boards and bodies melding and blending and then, sad gouache, caught bright on the dancefloor, at the baths, at the gym. 

His trainer (whom he'll do; it's a given) asks him for ten more, twenty more, and he feels it, lats and traps, all the creatine he's slept through.

Daphne, Justin's little friend, is onto him, which shouldn't surprise him considering who she hags around with. Sweet-tart, straignt-but-not-narrow, queer in her own way because she's going to follow the crooked paths, the secret passages under the sidewalks and around the backs of buildings, through breezeways and constructions and campuses, the places most people can't find. She sees him and she knows what he is and he watches her hold her tongue until she can't, until Justin's got the headphones on tight and she's standing there with her bookbag and her wise, working mouth.

Brian, she says, when she gets over not looking him in the eye, you'd better not hurt him. 

_You'd better not,_ he hears, _keep him here_. 

*****

He thinks about shit, sometimes, how _community_ makes him itch, how _Pride_ makes him itch more, and not because he isn't. Justin asks him things he can't begin to answer because he's always known: everywhere, Miami to Mexico, bathhouse to Babylon, is in some way the same, fucked-up, violent, greedy, addicted, angry, subject to prejudice, righteous, rebellious, true. Pitts says _yeah_ , Pitts says _hell no_ , says _hey, sonny boy, look at that rainbow arching over the Point and well, sonny boy, in the end it all ends, all of it, even you, sure as the rivers run down to the sea._

*****

He fucks, and he fucks up, and what did any of them expect. The city ferries him all night, to places even he's never been, 'til his head's hot and his throat's raw and he almost can't get it up anymore.

Lindsay and Mel read him the riot act. Deb reads him the riot act. 

Join the club, he says, and if they don't understand, it's on them. He's holding Gus and nothing matters at the moment except:

This boy could cure AIDS, or cancer, or maybe both. This boy (or another) could be an artist, a real one, not, like his father, just a (top-notch) trafficker of what other people want to see. In college, he and Linds lay in bed and smoked and talked about denial, talked about the Beaux-Arts, about the campus they'd come to knowing they weren't their parents' children, how this was the place that was going to (clove cigarettes, art books, queer theory, uppers) sculpt them into what they were.

Jesus Christ, Brian, Linds is saying--and it might be then, or it might be now.

Justin looks at him and tells him, earnest as pie, that he's not the worst dad that ever lived, that he's not, well, a walking wound that fucking fills up, that the city fills up, that he's something else, that he's more than his disdain and his cocktails and his clothes; his dick, his radar, his eye.

*****

Once (post-bowling, post Dairy Mart) his father left a bruise in the shape of Pennsylvania, and practically its size. Mikey looked horrified and Deb called Jack a motherfucker in front of the two 14-year-olds and Brian thought idly, _well_ , if he hadn't fucked my mother I wouldn't be here.

He's fiddling with his camera, clicking away, making magic of pool boys and sad shoes, thinking how there's no problem he can't solve, that he couldn't solve then by running and and now by having some balls.

The city'll wish him a happy birthday, let his friends pretend he's mortal, let him flirt with it: an end, a beginning, boys, addictions, his empty fridge, his empty tomb. The city'll let him see: Justin kissing his hair, calling him _muse_ ; the future in the shape of his son, who is free, who will never know what it's like to be born of this place, not really--

and there's Justin again, real or no, doodling in the margins of a book, shedding skins only he can see (his parents, his childhood, the hetero pre-sets of his pre-charmed life) and there's the tick of time, thirty years of it spooled out to some silent song, where he puts out a hand and pulls Justin up and spins him once, around the floor and then again.

*****

You're fucking high, Mikey says. He hasn't got laid today and he's cranky; look at his down-turned cartoon mouth. 

Not nearly high enough, Brian says, southerning it up the way he does sometimes, like he's not a northerner through and through and Irish besides, consort and least-favorite/favorite lover-son of the City of Bridges and earl of Liberty. He's on his back on the sofa, staring at the ceiling, smoking and sweating a little, though the loft is cold. 

You're sick, then, Mikey says.

Maybe. 

Michael can motherfuss with the best of the them, but he doesn't, just fetches him a bottle of water and a couple of (expired) aspirin and doesn't say anything about Brian's pet trick-of-the-light who's left his non-ethereal traces all over the place--a jizzed-in sock, maybe; a mechanical pencil, a list of ten-dollar words ( _ephemera_ , my ass), a wrapper from a chocolate-chip granola bar, condom skins particular to himself, his very own marks on this too-solid plane.

Look, Mikey says, and here it comes. But then it doesn't. 

I can see the future, Brian says, quite seriously.

Michael lets himself be pulled into a kiss despite the possible contagion, says:

_Yeah,_ sure you can. 

Good money says he believes it, though; always could sell Mikey on a vision, x-ray in particular.

Or this:

The city has witnessed a million backalley blowjobs, a million quick fucks; sometimes it says to him: _not that one, look the other way; stay lucky, stay safe._

And he is saved.

*****

When the door slides open he doesn't even move. 

Let's dance, he says, to no-one in particular. He's been listening to Bowie, stardust and spiders and lodgers and dogs, and oh yeah,  _god only knows--_

_what I'd do without you._

His ghost has socked feet and has drawn, somehow, rings of light around himself. He slips into Brian's space and looks at him in the bed and glows. His shirt is blue and his eyes are what his eyes are--

the whole goddamn vault.

Ah, Brian says, my shadow, and Justin's brow furrows, just like that.

Michael says you're sick, he says, do you need--

Mikey, Brian says, is full of shit, but he doesn't move when Justin sheds his shirt and lies down next to him, puts his lips on his brow like a worried mother. Doesn't move when Fuller grinds its gears outside and Justin's cold hands are on his face, doesn't move until they move together, and he is young and Justin is old, or he is young and Justin is young, and this is what the city gives him: time like two rivers flowing into one. When he stands on the roof-edge and hears the clocks, the seasons, the years, it gives him a perfect sketch of the skyline, the traffic-pulse of Crosstown and the windows of the Triangle reflecting his own face; every fall and shine and click and coupling it promised him, all those years ago when he was only a boy, tumbling snot-nosed into snow to ditch his drunken dad: 

_I will keep you forever young._

He didn't say then, and he doesn't say now: _what if I can find that--_

_somewhere else._

***** _  
_

You should pay more attention to the wildlife in this place, Marilyn said to him once, and no, I don't mean the kind on the avenue. See what it does. You'd learn something.

She was talking about haunts, he supposes, lairs, peregrine cliffs, adaptation and survival, about precocial things other than himself, and doesn't he already know about those.

He and his ghost are kissing, jesus, like other people fuck, like _he_ fucks, and it's almost enough, which is as confusing as the night he became a father (twice, he could joke, but it's not funny anymore when Justin hip-holds Gus like his own, speaks clipped to his sad-eyed mom, talks college with his prep-school kit drooping over Brian's chair, smokes and tricks and steals scotch and says shit he shouldn't know; shouldn't be so wise, so innocent, so old.)

Follow your genius, Brian says, and Justin's elbows shift on the bar; his face greenlit, ecto- and spark.

(Brian drove down to Fallingwater once, alone and not even high, and thought, like now, that he would drown, one cantilever at a time, in the sound and the lines of it, the frames a camera could never catch.)

What do _you_ want, Justin says, and no-one's ever asked him in that exact way, in this exact place; never quite like that.

*****

Sometimes (looking out at the street, watching his boy go off to work, to school, to do what he has to), his heart's swoops and steeps, a funicular, the cityview nothing to his own fucking feeling.

You self-indulgent fuck, he thinks.

It's just his own voice, channeled through the streets like southerlies; carried along, Monongahela-Allegheny-Ohio; what goes around comes around, and comes around again.

He's an asshole because he can be, because Pittsburgh says: that's how you make it. Heart black as coal. The rivers were poisoned long ago, and came back. 

You're a father, Lindsay shouts at him. Then she asks him not to be.

It's true:

He is a father, and a fucker, and a fighter. He is this place and it is him. That's not love unless the city says it is.

But he looks at Justin and he doesn't know, something liberates, aconfluence of lips and soul.

Brian, Justin is saying, what are you--

thinking?

_Youth is a wild freedom I never had._

_You couldn't seem less like a winter child._

And: _I'm gonna give you something you won't forget, sunshine. This, too._

But Justin is ghost, and not tethered here in the way some spirits are, not a candle guttering in his mother's church or a spectre dragging the northside graveyard where his father is buried; not a shade but an unchained melody; he can go anywhere, anywhere at all--and one day, he will.

 

 

 


End file.
